Monday, December 31, 2012

Slave Mentality: 1

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"And the Egyptians worked the Children of Israel בפרך."

The Talmud offers two possible understandings of the word בפרך. Either it means that whey worked them with a soft mouth, or that they gave them work which broke them.

The Bais Yaakov of Ishbitz explains that the Egyptian monarchy embarked on a propaganda campaign to cause the Jewish Nation to forget the fact that they had ever been free people. They encouraged the Jews to develop a slave mentality  and thereby to lose hope of ever becoming free. They lured them into believing that that which they received from their slave-masters was the most they could ever hope to receive in their lives. They ceased to feel that they were slaves and began to believe that the state in which they were living was their natural state.

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